The Attitude of High-School Students Regarding Online Learning During Covid-19 Pandemic Situation: The Case of Albania

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study of the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic situation created in the pre-university education system in Albania for two years. We are mainly interested in students' attitudes on online learning and its effect on their knowledge and future learning. For this, we have performed a survey composed of 28 questions answered by 1506 high-school students, of which 67.5 % study in public schools. Most students, 87.7 % of them prefer traditional learning, i.e., being in the classroom, while only 6.6 % seem to prefer more online learning. 79.4 % of the students have answered that they had the entire necessary appliance for online learning, but only 9.3 % of the total students admitted that they never had technical problems during online learning/teaching, while most of them usually had. The majority of students admit that their performance during the online classes was not at a high-quality level. Although they feel comfortable being online most of the time, they don't feel the same about being online for studies purposes. They don't feel very motivated to study online, because among other reasons, interestingly, they all admit that they are not self-disciplined and independent to do that. Consequently, they were not willing to regularly learn during online lessons, and they tend to cheat during the online exams. Unfortunately, this attitude has caused them a lack of knowledge to use in future classes. The results show that Albanian high-school students are not confident about online classes, and their attitude toward online learning seems to be not as good as pretended. Nevertheless, their behaviour and attitude seem to be improved during the second year of online teaching. However, from their responses, we conclude that they would like to combine online learning with the traditional one time to time because they believe this will help them become more independent and more responsible for the future.